Update: It’s been pointed out that column D does represent if it is a new policy setting which has revealed many more settings. The complete reference guild to all the new Windows 8 group policy setting has now been published. A quick search through this spread sheet show there are 216 new administrative settings (27 161 Unique) specific to Windows…

With yet another release of Windows (seems like it was only last year… errr… wait), Microsoft has also released a new version of the remote server admin tools (a.k.a. RSAT). RSAT allow you to install the tools needed to manage your servers from a Windows 8.1 computer. You might not think you need the RSAT installed as you are just…

The Group Policy Search Engine is a great web site that has all the different version of Microsoft Group Policy ADMX files that allows you to easily and quickly search for the policy setting. This site is one I use very frequently especially and is a must have bookmark for any Group Policy Administrator. Well, Stephanus from Microsoft who maintains…

Microsoft has just released the RTM version for people who have MSDN or TechNet subscriptions of Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2 (see http://blogs.technet.com/b/windowsserver/archive/2013/09/09/attention-technet-and-msdn-subscribers-windows-server-2012-r2-available-for-download-today.aspx). The really great new about this release is that there are a few new Group Policy setting, most notably NATIVE support for IT Administrators to configured boot to desktop. The setting name is called “Go…

As I briefly mention in my previous blog post about Group Policy Caching (https://www.grouppolicy.biz/2013/07/group-policy-caching-in-windows-8-1/) both Group Policy Preferences Drive Mappings and Disk Quotas are no longer processed as a Synchronous policy setting. But what does this exactly mean…. Put simply Drive Mappings (and Disk Quota) policy settings will now apply in the background for the users without them having to…

Another new feature of Group Policy in Windows 8.1 is the ability for it to now cache Group Policy to improve performance when processing synchronous policy settings. Now before you say Windows 8 already starts REALLY FAST how can this make it any faster, this caching only really kicks in some very specific fringe cases. Specifically it improves performance when…

As your probably know the world  facing an IP Apocalypse and as such sooner of later we will all have to start embracing IPv6 weather we like it or not. While Windows has supported IPv6 natively for many years now Microsoft has been slowly chipping away at IPv6 support for many of its other products. Well the good news is…

As you probably know Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview is now available for download. For your convenience i have gone thought all the Group Policy administrative settings and listed all the new policy setting for Windows 8.1 / 2012 R2. Some of the settings names are pretty obvious, but other like “Default” and “WinX” are somewhat vague to say the…